


Practice Makes Perfect

by Quilljoy



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: ALL of the romance tropes, F/F, First Kiss, Obnoxious mentions of D&D skills and spells, Practice Kissing, Roommates, Sharing a Bed, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, tiefling anatomy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-10 16:11:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18663811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quilljoy/pseuds/Quilljoy
Summary: Jester wonders if she will ever have a first kiss worthy of a romantic novel. Beau, of course, is happy to provide.





	Practice Makes Perfect

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta-ed. We die like men!

Beauregard was halfway between consciousness and blissful sleep when Jester poked her in the knee.

“Beau?”

“Hmn?”

“What was your first kiss like?”

Sleep clung to her eyes like dust. The question settled in slowly, and not with Jester’s usual bluntness, asked so softly Beau might as well have heard it wrong. Jester did it, sometimes. Ask for things in that sing-song voice of hers, thinking people would be none the wiser if she played sweet.

“Huh?” Beau refused to open her eyes.

“Your first kiss, dummy! What was it like?”

Why are you asking about it? Beau thought to question. But the words died in her mouth as soon as she shook away her tiredness and realized it was Jester. Jester, who’d give her more trouble than it was worth, and who’d take away her only chance at proper rest they’d had in weeks of travel if she thought Beau would make for easy conversation.

“Uh. Shitty.”

The only in in miles offered no comfort but the one of a stinky bed. Per _room_. Caleb and Nott might’ve been used to such arrangements, but Beauregard was having trouble as it was, swatting Jester’s tail away from her side of the bed and pretending to sleep as Jess kept the lights on, cooing about her latest novel. Any other occasion, she’d have been thrilled to sleep next to a handsome figure with muscles in all the right places and curves in the dangerous ones, but alas, the company Beauregard used to keep had changed.

At least she wasn’t the one rooming with a giant Firbolg.

“We were eight. He kissed me on a dare.”

“Oh,” Jester said. For a split second, guilt for destroying Jester’s notions of romance flared in Beauregard’s chest, but that happened before she remembered those romances were responsible for keeping her up all night. “Did you punch him?”

“Of course”

“Good.”

Silence fell above them. Beauregard, who’d raised her hands to her eyes to shield them from the moonlight pouring in, had waited for more until sleep had nearly claimed her again when Jester interrupted.

“Beau.”

“Yeah?” She hoped the hands above her eyes conveyed her eagerness to start conversation.

“That doesn’t count, does it?”

Suddenly, Beauregard felt very cross. Still reeling from her dreams (where a scantily clad demoness fought her, hand-on-hand), she felt her way into a half-sitting position, supporting her weight over her elbow and wiping at her eyelids. With her vision clouded, she could not see Jester’s expression. She’d blown the candle at last, and although the room was too bright for her to chase sleep, it was dark enough that, without her goggles, she couldn’t see anything but a small white fang, peeking from Jester’s lower lip and biting into the skin there.

“Is this about Fjord?”

God, she hoped Cad was smothering him in his sleep. Jester tightened her hands around their tattered bedsheet, pulling it so taut it disentangled from Beau’s knees. They were all assholes, in one way or another, and it didn’t mean Beau liked any of them any less. But it took a special kind of asshole to make a girl lose rest from worry. Beau would know - she was that kind of idiot.

“He kissed me,” she said, breathlessly - fiercely. There was an odd determination to it, that deflated once she pressed further. “I mean. It was mouth-to-mouth. Does it not count? I wouldn’t want my first kiss to be unconscious.”

“If it counts,” Beau reasoned, knowing it was not the smart thing to do, “you tried mouth-to-mouth with Caleb, once.”

“I wasn’t unconscious back then,” she brought the covers to her chin, hiding while leaving Beau completely exposed.

“No, you weren’t. And neither was he.”

With the darkness to aid her, Jester would’ve been good at hiding, were her tail not peeking out and swaying sadly. Beauregard could understand – she wished her first kiss hadn’t been with a smelly, dour sad boy, either, back when she still believed in fairytales, but eh, what was there to be done? She raised one hand, tentatively, but brought it back to herself when Jester rose her body with violence.

“It doesn’t count, right? It can’t count. It didn’t even have tongue.”

“First of all: ew.” Beau didn’t want any nightmares about Caleb’s tongue anywhere near her. “Second of all– yeah? I guess. Everybody knows it has to have tongue to count.”

“Everybody,” Jester parroted, crossing her arms under her chest. She must really have been sheltered, if Fjord and Caleb were her only experiences, and man, what a sad thought that was. Besides the near death circumstances. There were probably worse options around, but for the life of her, Beau could not think of any. It stood to reason that Jester would pursue a happier line of questioning.

“What was your first kiss like, uh?” She asked again, mischief dripping from her every word. She turned her head to Beauregard, and with her Cobalt Soul training, Beau sensed the incoming slaughter before Jester poked her in the belly – once, twice, and even more, until the two of them had forgotten any possible sour mood, and Beauregard was on her back, laughing and begging Jester to stop with the tiefling above her. “The real one! Was there… slobbering? Gross noises? Messy bodily fluids? Tell me, tell me!”

“Ugh, Jester!” She tossed her friend aside, not capable of hiding the painful smile Jester had inflicted upon her. That was… A kind way of putting it. A funny way. With heat curling on her belly, Beau thought of hiding, and sloppy kisses behind closed doors with her chambermaid, when she thought her parents to be away. She thought of dark hair and a freckled nose and – wasn’t that hilarious? Jester had freckles, too, and liked the same kind of ridiculous poofy dresses. “The past is in the past,” she said, feeling wise for her age. Caduceus was rubbing off on her. Or maybe that meditation was doing some good, after all, all the ten minutes of it. “No experiences are alike.”

“Boo.” Jester stuck her tongue out.

They both fell back to bed, in slightly more disarray, now that their scuffle had taken its toll on the bed sheet. There was a small tear on the mattress, and straw had flown and stuck itself to Beau’s hair. Jester brushed it away before Beau could do anything about it.

“I just wanted to know if I had anything to look for, that’s all. Do you think I do? Or am I… Am I just too stupid to hope for it?”

“Being hopeful is not stupid, Jess.”

“Sometimes I feel I am. WIth all the books, and…” She gestured vaguely to nowhere Beau could see in the dark. “And my _mom_. I know what boys are like.”

“Alright,” Beauregard granted her, feeling generous enough to stop Jester from self-recriminating when she could do it herself, “maybe the books _are_ stupid.”

The shocked gasp was exactly the reaction she’d been hoping for.

“But it’s alright for books to be stupid, Jess, and fun, and dreamy. You can, like, fall for Oskar or whatever– although I don’t see what you see in him besides the muscle, you know, it’s not like he did anything for Genevieve besides the common courtesy of saving her life, and we basically do the same thing everywhere we go and we don’t see any peasants falling for us, meanwhile Genevieve is like, ohhh, Oskar is so brave for killing a shitty–”

“– hey!”

“– the point is. The point is: life doesn’t follow a planned script. It’s just… chaos, and figuring out stuff as you go. Your first kiss might be shitty, it might be nothing special, it might be a fucking fairytale romance kiss. It doesn’t mean your following kisses can’t be different. Or that kissing isn’t worth it at all.”

“Can’t you tell me anything about them?” Jester sounded mournful, and it was somehow worse than the sing-song voice of hers. She was also huffing from their mock fight, or maybe it was just righteous anger from having her favorite book mocked, after all. “Your first kisses. Please.”

“You should hope for a good first kiss, Jess. Shit, if anybody out there deserves anything, that person is you.”

“Please?” She tried again. Beau pushed her palm against her face, and sent Jester sprawling on her back once she drew close, attempting persuasion by scaring the shit out of her with her nightlight, glow-in-the-dark eyes. They blinked a couple of times, in surprise, and Jester was so close Beau could feel the heat off of her skin, even if she’d stolen all the covers. She could see her expression.

Beau sighed, defeated.

“She was my age. A couple of years older, maybe, I don’t know.”

Any remaining trace of sadness was gone from her eyes in a second. Jester flipped on her stomach and placed her chin on both hands.

“Ohhhh. A teacher figure?” She snuck her face closer, nose poking towards Beau’s direction. Beau could see her eyebrows now, moving up and down in a salacious innuendo. “Was that your hot monk friend?”

“What? No, I didn’t take that long to kiss anyone!” And then Beau corrected herself, because Jester clearly had– “I mean, not that it matters. But it definitely wasn’t Dairon. She was a maid, that’s all. Worked for my family. Doing my bed mornings and–”

“Doing you by night!” Jester concluded, in a high-pitched squee. “Oh my god, Beauregard. That is so _romantic_. The dashing nobleman’s daughter, who wears pants and doesn’t care what anybody says about it, ravishing a young maiden in her lavish bed!”

Beau frowned.

“… when you put it like that.”

“What was her name?”

“Uh.” Her mind drew a blank. “Johanna.”

There definitely had been a Johanna in her life, once. Right?

“Johanna!” Jester drew in a long breath, dreamily. She closed her eyes and her hair fell on Beau’s shoulder, once she tilted her head towards her. Beneath the covers, her tail whipped back and forth, just as eagerly as her legs, kicking the air. “I’m gonna dream about a Johanna tonight. What was she like?”

“A huge improvement on Fjord as far as fantasies go.”

“I’m gonna hit you with my hand axe.” Jester smiled, and Beauregard knew that she meant it.

“Uh. Short. Short, dark hair. Tiny boobs, but like, very pert, and stuff.”

Wasn’t her fault she remembered only the best parts of it. Jester’s eyes opened again and she gave Beau a mean look – they were close, now. Just as close as she remembered being with the girl.

“I mean her personality, Beau.”

“Not what I was interested in.”

Jester blew a raspberry. Beau had to wipe the spit that had flown to her face, only to realize, once she opened her eyes again, Jester looking at her with more interest each passing second. She’d been inching closer. Their knees were touching, and not in an uncomfortable way.

“Beau.”

“What.”

Jester sounded positively dangerous.

“Will you teach me how to kiss?”

What.

Jester couldn’t have driven the air off of her lungs in any other way, not even if she’d put her hand above her chest and cast _Inflict Wounds_ . Beau would know. She’d done it, once. It felt, at the same time, like being hit with her teacher’s _stunning strike_ and falling into bed with Keg, whose attention had been a welcoming, if disconcerting, distraction from the plight of Jester’s kidnapping and Molly’s death. It felt like reading one too many books.

She pushed Jester away with one finger to her forehead.

“I,” her voice shook, “will tell Caleb to burn your novels.”

“You wouldn’t!” Jester gasped. Her eyes met her finger in the middle of her face, and she looked ridiculous and entirely kissable, now that Beau was thinking about it.

God-fucking-dammit.

“All of them. I’m gonna burn Oskar.”

Jester took both hands to her mouth and fell on her ass.

“I didn’t offend you, did I?”

“I’m pretty fucking offended!”

“I didn’t mean it! I just thought– Well, you’ve got the experience, you’ve got the charm. You are super pretty and you aren’t the kind of person who’d judge me for being an awful kisser–”

“Sto–”

“And you are so nice and, like, you’ve kissed plenty of girls, so I thought maybe you wouldn’t mind kissing me, because, like, I thought I was pretty? I am the daughter of a pretty famous whore, you know? And–”

“Jess–”

“And you totally thought my mom was hot and– Wow. This is weird. I shouldn’t have mentioned my mom. But regardless, I think you are, like, the handsomest of our friends, like maybe except Fjord, of course, but Fjord is a jerk face and I wouldn’t want to kiss him, anyway, not with that mouth having been anywhere near Avantika, and I bet you’re better at kissing anyway. You’re definitely better at flirting–”

“Jess…”

“And you’re always thinking of me and being sweet to me, and I figured, “ _Maybe it wouldn’t be weird at all if I crushed on her and not Fjord, right?”_ , and we tried some kissing, and maybe it would lead to other things, like they do in the novels, and maybe– Just maybe– You’d reveal  you were secretly in love with me all along, and after we, like, dealt with the dodecahedron and stuff we could move in together, maybe open a detective agency and stuff, now that Nott’s gonna go away, and I could send Nugget to track Professor Thaddeus in any plane of existence that he might have flown to and– Did I tell you I’m teaching Nugget to track stuff, now? It’s really cool, Beau, I could show–”

Beau kissed her.

In a panicked reaction, she squashed Jester’s cheeks between both hands and kissed her, like she always did whenever a girl would talk feelings. It was her immediate response; her go-to action. Keg had tried telling her she loved her, and Beau had shushed her with her head between her strong thighs.

Beau grabbed Jester by the shoulders and  pulled away immediately.

Oh no. Oh no. Here she was, telling Jester she deserved the best first kiss ever, and she had…

“Oh,” Jester whispered, eyes wide and terrified. “I’m a terrible kisser.”

“No!” Beau yelled. “No, that was– It was barely– Pfff, you call that a kiss? It didn’t have tongue! I thought we’d settled on that, right?”

Jester’s eyes looked down, where her elaborate nightgown had fallen off of her shoulder and her naked legs were tangled around the bedsheets– and Beau’s. Her stare forlorn, her hope lost. When she curled her fingers and grasped at the edge of her gown, her hands shook so much and her arms were so taut with tension, her chest heaving with perspiration. And then her eyes were up again.

“You gonna kiss me, then? With tongue?”

Beau’s heart was already beating furiously against her chest. Yes! Yes, she was going to kiss her, dammit. Wasn’t like Jester wasn’t kissable, with that goddamn, tiefling split tongue of hers, and the pouty lips, and the smile unfurling in the corner of her m–

“I’m waiting, Beau.”

Jester closed her eyes. And waited.

Beau grit her teeth. _Asshole._

One of her eyes popped open once she figured Beau was taking too long to fall for her charms.

“ _Stillness of mind_ ,” Beau mouthed to her.

“I _wasn’t charming anyone_ ,” Jester mouthed back, picture perfect of innocence. “Not with magic, anyway.”

She smiled. The freckles looked good on her, a constellation of dark stars on her blue cheeks. Hair fell all over her face, and Jester couldn’t have looked more devious, nor more angelic than at that moment. With a swipe of her tongue, she wet her lips, and before she could say anything else Beau was on her, pushing her against the mattress, holding her arms and kissing her deeply like she would to a lover. Jester didn’t surrender gently. Beau felt the curve of her leg between her thighs, kicking them apart, her knee pressed firmly against her ass. Jester kissed as ferociously as she fought. There was nipping and biting and the taste of sugar glaze on her lips, too sweet and too violent at the same time. She licked Beau’s thumb when it grazed her mouth; she sucked on the bottom of her lip until it was red and raw. She moaned freely when Beau’s fingers dug into her hair, and found purchase once she was let go, pulling Beau by the waist until their bodies met. It was not much different than meeting her on the battlefield, Beau thought, as Jester flipped their positions and landed on top of her. It was the good kind of hurt.

They parted only once Jester surrendered, panting due to the lack of air. She was red on her face – or at least, a deep purple. Her gown had nearly fallen down the top of her chest and, with good faith and a bit of imagination, Beau could conjure a good image of what Jester would look underneath it, kicking herself, mentally, for not paying any mind when they’d bathed together. Jester looked at her with the same hungry eyes. Ravenous. She had, clearly, been staring, only in her case, getting caught and experiencing such a wildly new thing had her blushing, confused, scared, and terribly, given by the gentle rocking of her hips, terribly aroused.

“What do you think?” she asked. One finger found a loose strand of hair and begun curling it, gingerly. “Was I any good?”

“Wow.” Beau blinked once. Then another time. “ _Wow_.”

“Top five?”

“Eh.” She was still struggling to catch up with her breathing. Beau lift one hand, making a more-or-less gesture with it. “Top ten, at least.”

Jester giggled, shying away from her, suddenly embarrassed by her display of want. “Nothing some more practice can’t improve, right?”

“This,” Beau said, once her hands snuck up to Jester’s waist and dragged her down with them, “is what I was hoping you’d say.”

And then she kissed Jester once more, for good measure. With tongue. She tried not thinking of any strangeness to it, any morning afters to come. It was just kissing, and Jester’s body rocking against hers, and their gentle and not-so-gentle moans of bliss. She definitely didn’t think of sneaking a hand up Jester’s skirt, not even when she looked like she could use her help, eyes closed and head tossed back, giving in to Beau’s mouth on her neck and shoulder. She didn’t even think of baring her breasts. They had seen each other naked before, and intimacy – the intimacy they had – hadn’t come from her mouth closing around Jester’s throat, nor Jester’s sharp nails dragging lines across her back.

It was the candle light, kept bright as Jester read.

It was the comfort of Jester’s words, as she defended her from Nott’s japes.

It was in their own, little jokes and stolen glances as they communicated without words; their dance in the battlefield.

(A rainy night, on a deck, muttering those words she’d never told anyone before)

One day, she might have more of Jester, in ways she’d had other women before. But right now, she was quite content to let Jester have this other side of her, the vulnerable one she’d never displayed anyone.

And the kissing, of course.

After all, Jester was a good kisser.


End file.
